(Bloomberg) -- Boris Johnson is winning the media war in the race to be Britain’s next prime minister, making bigger digital waves than rival Jeremy Hunt and getting better coverage in the country’s right-wing newspapers.
Tying up the votes of the 180,000 Conservative members who select the party’s leader -- just 0.27% of the U.K. population -- calls for highly targeted messaging, making platforms like Facebook and Britain’s Tory-supporting press important.
On Facebook, where adverts can be delivered to users according to traits like their age, gender and interests, Johnson is outspending Hunt, according to data from Facebook’s Ad Library.
Johnson spent almost six times more than his rival between July 2 and July 8, the period during which voters received their ballots, painting himself as the candidate who would deliver Brexit on October 31 and unite the country. Johnson’s Facebook page has also attracted 565,000 ‘likes’, whereas Hunt’s only has 12,700.
Facebook was a vital battleground in both the 2016 Brexit referendum and 2017 general election and was credited by Vote Leave Campaign Director Dominic Cummings as having a decisive role in delivering the vote for Brexit.
“It’s easy to parody Conservative members as all being very ancient, but there’s quite a lot of evidence that politically active older people are digital-savvy,” said Charlie Beckett, a media and communications professor at the London School of Economics. “Facebook is definitely key.”
On Twitter, where Johnson has 624,000 followers to Hunt’s 191,000, Johnson tweeted his direct-to-camera pitch to voters from Tuesday’s head-to-head televised debate and attracted more retweets and likes than any of his rival’s posts that evening.
Johnson’s individual tweets throughout the leadership campaign have also regularly drawn more ‘likes’ than Hunt’s, attracting thousands of expressions of support, compared to the low hundreds for Hunt.
In Britain’s traditionally-Conservative-supporting newspapers, Johnson is also dominating Hunt. Since a domestic row with his girlfriend two weeks ago, Johnson has received more favorable coverage or prominence than Hunt on the front pages of each of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express newspapers. Conservative voters are most likely to read one of those three newspapers, according to research conducted by YouGov after the 2017 general election.
Over the last two weeks, articles focused on Johnson have featured 10 times on the front page of the Telegraph newspaper -- for which he writes a regular column, compared to three times for Hunt. In the Mail, the front-runner’s had three front-page appearances to Hunt’s zero, and four in the Express to Hunt’s two.
The winner of the leadership contest is due to be announced on July 23.
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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